Project Management The project I was involved in is in the IT industry. It involved a team of five individuals: a project manager, three developers and a tester. The final deliverable was the completion of a module of the larger application, namely a model that involved several calculations in Excel and the development of a set of charts and graphics. All human resources were involved at the time of development. Other resources included computers and software applications that were necessary in the process.

There were several project management tools used. One of the most important was the project status reports. The project status report allowed the project manager (and, in fact, any of the members of the team) to give an immediate answer to top management when asked about the evolution of the project. The project status report appeared as one of the most comprehensive instruments. It shows not only budgetary and temporal scheduling, like some of the other tools, but it also covers areas such as scope, risk and resources.

The project status report was a particularly effective and useful tool. As mentioned, it has an overarching aim and, likely, all other tools could potentially be eliminated if the project status report is used. It seems...

Both dimensions should be analyzed here. First of all, the scheduling component means that the team elaborated a Gantt chart with which it proposed dates for completion for each of the parts in the development process. There were at least two important elements here: (1) the fact that all tasks will be properly scheduled and the team was thus able to monitor the evolution of the process and (2) dependencies were decided between the different phases of development, again very relevant to the scheduling activity.
At the same time, the integrated cost and scheduling system balances more things by including the cost of these processes into the overall analysis. It is important to understand not only when a certain phase of the development process can begin, but also if there are sufficient resources to commit to that particular phase.

Another instrument that was used was the Work Authorization System (WAS). The Work Authorization System came to complete the integrated cost and scheduling system balance by…